Why I’m Pro-Life and Pro-Choice
He was told to approach the subject of abortion careful since a number of women in the congregation had had one but the Pastor didn’t. As far as he was concerned he was there to proclaim God’s truth and it didn’t matter what anyone else had been through or how they felt about the subject.
Every post I make I try to share recount situations I’ve been through that relate to the theme of what I write but when it comes to abortion not a lot comes to mind. I’ve only sat through one sermon dedicated entirely to the subject of abortion and it was briefly mentioned in another sermon. This subject in real life doesn’t come up much, it’s only online where I’ve seen the subject discussed by Christians and at times such discussions can get real nasty.
I think there was a time when I may have been strongly pro-life but if I ever was it was short lived. I once joined a Facebook group that was called Abortion is a Complicated Issue because the name of the group pretty much sums up how I feel about it. Really for the most part, even when I was a conservative Christian, I was on the fence of pro-life vs pro-choice argument and sort of still am
I think the choice of saving or taking of a life is not as straight forward as we like to think as it is. The Bible shows how complicated it can be. Many might say the fact that so many Christians are pro-life means that the Bible is pro-life but a further examination of the book shows in parts it is and other parts it isn’t.
Many are familiar with the time when Jesus said let the little children come to me but there’s also the time when he pretty much calls a child a dog. Things get even darker in the Old Testament where the killing of an entire people group that included children is commanded. We also have the Psalmist rejoicing at the thought of children being killed, a mother and her neighbour eating her child and then in the book of Numbers there’s the command that results in the shrivelling of a woman’s womb. Now people who are pro-life may remind us to consider the context and understand the times of when this took place, yet they don’t seem to want to understand the circumstances of the women who have abortions. From what I have seen many pro-life supporters label women who have had abortions as selfish murders and have no interest in listening to what women who’ve had abortions actually have to say.
The thing is the stories I’ve heard of women and girls who’ve have had abortions and they don’t appear to be all that selfish.
In Science VS, they dedicated an entire episode to the subject of abortion. During the show, they went into an abortion clinic and read two messages written in a journal by two women before they went through with the procedure. One message was written by a distraught woman who had spent her whole life discouraging women to not have abortions yet felt she had no choice but to go through with it. She ended the message by saying she hoped God would forgive her for what she was about to do.
On the podcast Death, Sex & Money Anna Sale interviewed a woman who used to protest outside clinics, only to find herself around 10 years later entering that very same abortion she protested against to have an abortion.
There’s another story of abortion in the podcast Happy Face. Mellisa Moore tells of how as a teenager she found out she was pregnant about the same time she learnt of her Father getting arrested for murdering a woman. Living with her grandparents in dire poverty, knowing she would be depended on her abusive boyfriend and welfare she opted for an abortion.
I don’t think these are stories of women being selfish. These are stories that show that life can be complicated. The same could be said of the stories of the killing of children in the Bible. In an ideal world, there would be no abortion or killing of children but that isn’t the world we live in. I think I once heard Christine Caine say in a sermon that at best life is messy and I think she’s right. And I would say that sometimes when we’re put in situations we may do things that in another circumstance we wouldn’t. It’s easy to hear stories of abortion and judge or read the Bible be disgusted at what they did but we may have done the same thing if we were in their shoes.
I’m not saying everyone who has an abortion isn’t doing it for selfish reasons but it’s unfair to say everyone who does terminate a pregnancy does it from a place of self-centeredness. I’m pro-life because the life of human beings is precious and I also recognise that life is complicated so I’m pro-choice as well.
